It’s June and I’ve got tomatoes and basil growing on my back deck. Chicago pools open this Friday. I need sunscreen when I go for my 6 am crutch walks. In other words: summer’s arrived.
Here’s what's on my mind besides trying to keep track of whether my son’s favorite “jazzy” shorts are clean.
Every blog post needs a job
The new Google SERP introduced at the company’s I/O event made it clear that the “zero-click era” is here to stay. The organic traffic declines brands have seen for years will continue. If you haven’t thought about your content strategy in a while, now is the time to do so.
Here’s how we’re approaching the shift:
- The blog post is no longer the default format. For a long time, B2B content marketing was almost synonymous with blogging. That era is over. Today, it makes more sense to focus first on key themes or messages you need to get out. From there, identify which channels you should be in based on your audience’s behavior, then decide what format an asset should take.
- Every blog post needs a job. Blog posts used to justify themselves via passive traffic. Make great content, and it would reward you with site visitors in perpetuity. No longer. That doesn’t mean the blog is dead, but every post now needs to be justified by its utility: will salespeople send it to prospects they’re nurturing? Does it contain original research? Is it where you’re announcing news? In other words, always have a specific reason for posting; don’t just do it out of habit.
- Get comfortable with active measurement. In the olden days of Google, measuring a blog’s success was as easy as looking at a dashboard. This was always a little wrong, because traffic was only ever a proxy for the thing we actually wanted to do, which was to convince people to buy from us. Now that organic traffic is drying up, we need measurements that tie to intended utilization: is the sales team actually sending a piece to prospects? Are people citing your research? Are you promoting the news on social? In addition to a job, every blog post needs a clear success metric.
So what should you be creating if not blog content? That depends on where your prospects spend time.
If they use LLMs (and B2B buyers increasingly do), you want to be visible in LLMs. While LLMs do ingest blogs, they may output the ideas from those blogs without citing the source.
Branded content like case studies and product guides, on the other hand, can lead to branded LLM mentions. Third-party brand mentions (e.g., in trade publications) are also highly cited.
Social is another common online hangout. Here are our current thoughts on how and why it’s worth getting some SMEs on LinkedIn.
Original research can be hugely valuable, both for driving media attention and making your site an online destination (“online destination” being one of the criteria shared by sites that are still winning Google traffic).
Basically, the right answer is much more dependent on the specifics of your situation and audience than it was 10 years ago, when pretty much every brand could benefit from the SEO benefit of consistent blogging.
Regardless of what format you decide to produce, one thing that nearly all content can benefit from today: evidence of lived experience. That means anecdotes, a unique voice, a strong point of view, etc. You can guess why: show your audience you’re not a bot, and they’ll stick around longer.
Speaking of lived experience…
How smart do you make your audience feel?
My favorite newsletters are the ones that make me feel smarter for having read them. That’s one thing I’m aiming for in this newsletter (I would love your feedback on how I’m doing).
When B2B content fails, I think it’s often because the author worried more about themselves than their audience.
I see this manifest in a few ways:
- The desire to use abstractions rather than specifics. Abstractions convey the full breadth of your capabilities (“strategic comms” vs “LinkedIn posts that get the lightbulb emoji”). But concrete examples are easier to picture and easier to remember. They’re also more likely to evoke an emotional response.
- The urge to only talk about your wins. The intent is to focus on what makes you smart and capable, but in reality, mentioning past failures from time to time conveys that you’re honest. It also demonstrates that you know what to do when things go wrong.
- The desire to extract maximum value for minimum effort. This happened to me in May. A brand whose updates I’d recently subscribed to sent a newsletter that was clearly AI-generated. I was insulted. I felt like a mark. You want me to buy from you but you can’t even take the time to write your own hype? What will happen if I have an issue with the product? Will I be in chatbot purgatory? Will there be AI hallucinations in my invoices? It was such a ridiculous self-own. I unsubscribed so fast and now do not trust that brand at all!
And look, I get where these instincts come from. You’re thinking “If I want these people to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on what I sell, I’d better reassure them that I know what I’m talking about.”
And that ~is~ one of the jobs of B2B content.
But most of the time, readers don’t remember the subject matter details as vividly as we remember how something makes us feel.
Even in the B2B world, there should be some degree of a parasocial relationship between you and your audience. People will be much more likely to buy from you if they trust you, and they’re more likely to trust you if they see you as a real human being with real strengths and weaknesses.
Five years ago, going all-in on professionalism in B2B content made sense for small brands. If you were competing with the McKinseys of the world, you had to show that you, too, had a briefcase and shiny shoes.
Today, it’s impossible to distinguish yourself with that playbook. Anyone with a keyboard and a few brain cells can generate a classic 1,000-word “think” piece.
It will be smooth. It will be grammatically correct. It will be abstract and boring as hell.
And it may lead your audience to unsubscribe from your materials because they feel insulted.
Writing from the heart used to be risky because you risked looking unserious. Today, the risk is still there – but the potential reward has increased dramatically.
Anyone who’s serious enough about their audience to take the time to write to them has at least that much going for them, you know? You care. You invest your time. That’s an implicit promise with big implications.
Possibly a real LLM visibility hack? Maybe?
Look, I am firmly in the camp of investing in things that lead to long-term benefits and avoiding short-term scammy / spammy hacks.
However, I recently came across a piece from SEO firm Nectiv Digital about how they created an “AI Instructions” page on their website that led to increased LLM visibility and citations within 48 hours.
It passed my sniff test, so I did it for Propllr. So far, we haven’t seen the results Nectiv has, but we’re a smaller company with less technical optimization.
I’m sharing this with you so you can evaluate the tactic for yourself. I’ll also keep you posted about whether this works (or spectacularly backfires) for us.
That’s all for me this month. I hope you’re all eating fresh produce and watching fireworks and staying up too late and finding sand in your shoes!
Brenna
